Psychology and anthropology

1058 Pages·2005·5.58 MB·English

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIAL AND
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIAL
AND CULTURAL
ANTHROPOLOGY
Edited by
Alan Barnard
Jonathan Spencer
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London & New York
First published 1996 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York,
NY 10001
First published in paperback 1998
This edition first published 2002
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“ To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of
thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.”
© 1996, 1998, 2002 Routledge
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available
from the Library of Congress
ISBN 0-203-45803-6 Master e-book ISBN
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ISBN 0-203-25684-0 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-28558-5 (Print Edition)
To the memory of Julia Swannell (1952–92)
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Editorial board
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Maurice Bloch
Ralph Grillo
Signe Howell
Marshall Sahlins
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Contents

Acknowledgements vi
Introduction vii
How to use this book x
List of entries xi
List of contributors xvii
Analytical table of contents xxvii
Contributions by author xxxiii

1
Entries

Biographical appendix 852
Glossary 890
Name index 937
People and places index 975
Subject index 988
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Acknowledgements

Many people have helped the editors to bring this volume to completion. The project
itself was first suggested by Mark Barragry of Routledge and, at different times, we have
been ably supported by Michelle Darraugh, Robert Potts and Samantha Parkinson of the
Routledge Reference Section. Friends and colleagues too numerous to mention have
withstood our many casual requests for advice and support, not to mention
contributions—some of which have been provided under heroic pressures of time and
space. Our editorial board has also been a source of sound advice and ideas. The
Department of Social Anthropology in Edinburgh has provided space, calm and, in the
final stages of the work, a smoking laser-printer. At different times we have been helped
there by Francis Watkins, Colin Millard, Sandra Brown and especially Joni Wilson—all
past or present PhD students in the department. Colin Millard and Robert Gibb, together
with the editors, translated contributions from the French. We have been especially
fortunate to work with Alan McIntosh who has brought a rare combination of skill,
patience and good advice to the copy-editing and indexing of this book
The editors have other, more personal debts to acknowledge. For Spencer, Janet
Carsten has been a source of amused tolerance as the project drifted out of control, while
Jessica Spencer gleefully set it all back a few months. Spencer learnt a great deal of what
he knows about lexicography from John Simpson, Yvonne Warburton and Edmund
Weiner of the Oxford English Dictionary. He learnt most, though, about the pleasure of
words and food and many other things, from Julia Swannell.
Barnard would like to thank Joy Barnard for putting up with his mild obsession for the
biographical details of long-dead anthropologists, and for providing strength and the
voice of common sense throughout the long hours the project has required. Corrie and
Buster added the calm atmosphere that only cats can create, while Jake the labrador was
as long-suffering as he was bemused by it all. Barnard has benefited much from
discussions with his students too, especially those in ‘Anthropological Theory’. Their
repeated request for a work of this kind has, we both hope, now been met with a source
that both embodies their inspirations and serves their intellectual desires.
ALAN BARNARD and JONATHAN SPENCER
Edinburgh, January 1996
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Introduction

The very idea of an encyclopedia seems eminently anthropological—in at least two
different ways. In its earliest use in classical Rome the term ‘encyclopedia’ referred to the
‘circle of learning’, that broad knowledge of the world which was a necessary part of any
proper education. In its employment in post-Renaissance Europe it has come to refer
more narrowly to attempts to map out systematically all that is known about the world.
Anthropology likes to think of itself as the great encyclopedic discipline, provoking,
criticizing, stimulating, and occasionally chastening its students by exposure to the
extraordinary variety of ways in which people in different places and times have gone
about the business of being human. But anthropology, through most of its 150–year
history as an academic discipline, has also been alternately seduced and repulsed by the
lure of great taxonomic projects to pin down and catalogue human differences.
If anthropology is indeed the most encyclopedic of disciplines, it is not especially
well—served with reference works of its own. This book aims to meet some of the need
for an accessible and provocative guide to the many things that anthropologists have had
to say. It focuses on the biggest and most influential area of anthropology, generally
known as cultural anthropology in North America and social anthropology (or ethnology)
in Europe. By combining ‘social’ and ‘cultural’, the American and the European, in our
title we have tried to indicate our desire to produce a volume that reflects the diversity of
anthropology as a genuinely global discipline. That desire is also shown in the topics we
have covered, from nutrition to postmodernism, incest to essentialism, and above all in
the specialists we have invited to contribute. Inside this book you will find a Brazilian
anthropologist charting the anthropological history of the idea of society, an Indian
reflecting on inequality, two Russians discussing ethnicity and an Australian writing on
colonialism, as well as a systematic set of entries on what anthropologists have had to say
about the lives and cultures of people living in different regions of the world.
The great encyclopedic projects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are, with
grand theories of all kinds, rather out of fashion in contemporary anthropology.
Classification, it is widely argued in the humanities and social sciences, is but one form
of ‘normalization’, and even Murray’s great Oxford English Dictionary has been
deconstructed to reveal a meaner project of imperial hegemony lurking beneath its
elaborate Victorian structure. What the world does not need, it seems, is an encyclopedia
which promises the last word and the complete truth on all that anthropologists know.
(And what teachers of anthropology do not need, it might be added, is the prospect of
endless course papers made up of apparently authoritative quotations from such a work.)
Instead of attempting the impossible task of fitting all that our colleagues do into some
final Procrustean schema, we have worked with more modest aims -to help our readers
find their way around a discipline which is far too interesting and important to be left in
the hands of academic specialists.
Since the Second World War, anthropology has grown enormously, and its concerns
are far wider than popular preconceptions about the study of ‘primitive peoples’. There
is, now, an anthropology of capitalism and global consumerism, an anthropology of
gender, an anthropology of war and an anthropology of peace; there is a lot of
anthropology in museums but more and more anthropology of museums; anthropologists
are still interested in the political life of people who live on the margins of the modern
state, but they are also increasingly interested in nationalism and ethnicity and the rituals
and symbols employed by modern politicians at the centre of modern states;
anthropologists are often now employed to advise on development projects, but they have
also started to look at the very idea of ‘development’ as a product of a particular culture
and history, one more way to imagine what it is to be human. Even the idea of the
‘primitive’, it has lately been discovered, tells us rather more about the people who use
the term to describe other people, than it does about the people so described.
Readers should think of this book, then, as a guide and an introduction, a map which
will help them find their way around the anthropological landscape rather than an
authority set up to police what counts as anthropologically correct knowledge about the
world. The readers we have imagined as we worked on the volume include, of course,
students and coileagues in university departments of anthropology around the world; but
they also include students and teachers in other disciplines—history, archaeology,
sociology, psychology, cultural studies among many others—who may feel the need to
come to terms with particular areas of anthropological work. Above all we hope we also
reach all sorts of people who are plain curious about who anthropologists are, what they
do, and what we can learn from them. We hope that all these different kinds of reader
will find material here which stimulates and provokes as well as informs.
Coverage and contributors
In drawing up our headword list we tried to balance a number of considerations.
Obviously we wanted to cover as broad a spectrum of contemporary social and cultural
anthropology as we could, but we were also aware that anthropology is oddly self-
conscious about its own past. Arguments in the present are frequently couched in the
form of revisionist versions of familiar charter myths, and controversies between
contemporaries ritually re-enact the great arguments of the ancestors. Students, in
particular, often find this confusing, knowing little about the collective memory of the
discipline and wondering why they should worry so much about the ancestors. When they
read the ancestors, there is often further confusion—key terms like ‘culture’ or ‘structure’
have shifted meaning over time, while much of the argument at any one time has been
about what exactly we should mean by these terms.